Woman Led Enchanted Life Writing To European Love

June 13, 1986|By Ann Kolson, KNT News Service

NEW YORK — The life of writer Helene Hanff has been a small but extraordinary one.

For 20 years, from 1949 to 1969, the Philadelphia-born Hanff, a droll, gutsy, failed playwright (turned TV scriptwriter and memoir writer) maintained a correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for a London bookseller, until his death.

Although they never met, the trans-Atlantic relationship strongly colored both their lives. Hanff's lively letters were published in 1970 in a slim volume called 84 Charing Cross Road, the address of the shop where Doel worked.

Later, the letters were turned into a successful BBC television play with Anne Jackson, which moved to London's West End and which opened on Broadway in 1982 with Ellen Burstyn.

Now, 84 Charing Cross Road is being brought to the screen by Mel Brooks' production company, Brooksfilms, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Filming was completed May 16; an early 1987 release is expected.

''It's quite a simple book of letters, but it seems to contain within it something much greater than letters between an American writer and a British bookseller,'' said the film's screenwriter, Hugh Whitemore, speaking from his home in London. ''It has great humanity.''

In an odd way, it is a love story.

Although, said Hanff, ''When I got the first letter from Frank signed 'Love,' I was shocked. I don't use that word lightly. I know people use it lightly today. I never did.

''I grieved for him. I loved him in a way, I suppose. I had never met him, and I would have found it impossible to write 'love' to somebody I never met.''

To Hanff, now 70 and living in New York, 84 Charing Cross Road ''is the story of my love affair with a bookshop . . . the bookshop and all the people who worked there. And Frank's wife and the old lady who lived next door. These people were important in my world, though I never met them. And when it ended, I had the books that would be here forever. I wrote the book to record what had been a lovely episode in my life.''

Recently, during filming on an upper east side street, this brief, straightforward movie scene took place:

Bancroft, playing Hanff, is walking a neighbor's dog and encounters her friend Maxine's mother. It is 1952. They chat about Maxine working on the London stage, and Hanff arranges for the actress to deliver nylon stockings to her bookstore acquaintances who are enduring postwar privations there.

It's not a grand gesture -- just one snippet among bits and pieces that, when added together, make an extraordinary lifetime. And, its principals hope, an extraordinary film.

How that life turned out ''astounds me every day,'' Hanff said, in a gravelly, smoke-edged voice. ''It's like a miracle that descended on me. I was resigned to be a failure for the rest of my life. I don't know how it happened.''

Not involved in the film, Hanff met Bancroft for the first time two weeks ago. ''We had a peachy day in the park,'' Hanff said of her meeting with the star who will portray her.

The film was shot in London and New York on a modest budget of $4.6 million. No action-adventure blockbuster, it will be talky, literate and chaste: ''If you can't do it modestly, you just can't do a film like this,'' acknowledged associate producer Jo Lustig on the set.

The high-class production was, by necessity, fast-paced in New York City, where filming costs are high. On some days the company, with its crew of 60, its mobile vans and its wardrobe trucks, would change locations five times, accompanied by the ever-present New York City police.

With all the movies shot here, said producer Geoffrey Helman, the officers assigned to the police department's film unit have become so savvy about filmmaking that ''they knew how to set up shots.''

Wardrobe from the '50s and '60s was found in vintage-clothing stores, including fussy hats, neat gloves, fitted coats and heavy pumps.

Translating such a static story to the screen was a challenge.

Hanff, who was forced to drop out of Temple University in Philadelphia during the Depression, revered books and educated herself at the Free Library of Philadelphia. She moved to New York City in 1938 after winning a play- writing fellowship at the age of 21. She took secretarial work, she wrote Theater Guild press releases, she wrote Women's Army Corps training films and she wrote plays at night.

In 1949, unable to afford new editions of the classics, she answered a classified ad for used books placed in the Saturday Review by Marks & Co., Antiquarian Booksellers, 84 Charing Cross Road, London WC2.

What began as a business correspondence developed into highly personal letters chronicling 20 years -- with Hanff coming to know Doel's co-workers, wife and children through the mails. Hanff sent letters and welcome food parcels. Besides the coveted leather-bound books, she received a recipe for Yorkshire pudding and an embroidered Irish linen tablecloth.

Twice Hanff planned trips to London, the city she had come to dream of, and twice she had to spend the money saved for the trip. In 1952, she needed expensive dental work, and four years later she had to purchase the lease on a new apartment.

Finally, in 1971, Doel died and the bookshop closed, Hanff made her first journey to her beloved London.